Research Mattershttp://yourontarioresearch.ca
Bringing university research to where people live, work and playThu, 30 Jul 2015 21:10:43 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.3Low tech water filterhttp://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/07/water-filter-goes-low-tech/
http://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/07/water-filter-goes-low-tech/#commentsMon, 27 Jul 2015 11:00:07 +0000http://yourontarioresearch.ca/?p=9828It may use the most simple of technology, but a new water filtration system is transforming thousands of lives in the Dominican Republic. Designed by University of Waterloo Masters of Public Health student, Timothy Muttoo, in partnership with the non-profit organization FilterPure, the new filters use locally-sourced clay, sawdust and particles of silver to remove 99.99 […]

]]>It may use the most simple of technology, but a new water filtration system is transforming thousands of lives in the Dominican Republic. Designed by University of Waterloo Masters of Public Health student, Timothy Muttoo, in partnership with the non-profit organization FilterPure, the new filters use locally-sourced clay, sawdust and particles of silver to remove 99.99 per cent of all water contaminants.

Waterloo grad student Timothy Muttoo shows the results of the clay water filter he designed. The water in the glass on the right has gone through the filter. (University of Waterloo)

“It really is an engineering innovation,” says Muttoo, who redesigned the composition of FilterPure’s original product to lower production costs and make the filters more affordable in the Dominican. “So many well-intentioned projects fail in developing countries because they aren’t sustainable or affordable.”

Water is first step out of poverty

One of the Caribbean’s poorest countries, 1.6 million people in the Dominican Republic do not have access to safe, clean water. UNICEF estimates that 50 per cent of children live in poverty, with 30 out of every 1000 dying before the age of five as a result of impure water and unhygienic living conditions.

“Without a safe, accessible water source, communities get trapped in a vicious cycle: poverty contributes to access problems; access problems perpetuate poverty,” says Muttoo, who launched his own non-profit, H2O 4 ALL, in 2008. “The effects of unsafe water and poor sanitation are devastating, but it is a completely solvable problem.”

The innovative bowl-shaped filters work by distilling dirty water through a porous clay membrane and into a clean receptacle bucket. The water is brought to safe drinking quality standards and is easily accessed from a spigot.

Working with, not for, communities

This year Muttoo and FilterPure plan to distribute 4,000 filters to families across the Dominican. Each filter can produce up to 30 litres of clean water per day. As part of the initiative, Muttoo will study the social uptake of the technology as well as work alongside community health leaders for training and monitoring of the filter usage and evaluating health impacts within impoverished communities.

“A key to sustainability is working with the communities, not for the communities,” said Muttoo.

Since its inception, H2O 4 ALL has led projects in 10 different countries around the world— all with the mandate of working with local partners on the ground.

Last summer Muttoo partnered with Save the Mothers and United Nations University in Uganda to drill a borehole well for Kawolo hospital, which serves Lugazi’s 1.2 million inhabitants. The well is an expansion of a rainwater filtration system he installed in 2012 for the hospital’s maternity ward — the hospital’s first ever access to safe water. As a result of both projects, infection rates at the hospital have plummeted to almost nothing.

“Thousands of people are alive and healthy because of collaborative projects like these and the people that reached out to help,” said Muttoo. “Sustainability, empowerment and health. That’s the power of giving people clean water.”

]]>http://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/07/water-filter-goes-low-tech/feed/0Breaking for waterhttp://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/07/breaking-for-water/
http://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/07/breaking-for-water/#commentsWed, 22 Jul 2015 15:46:48 +0000http://yourontarioresearch.ca/?p=10375A strenuous workout should be accompanied by frequent water breaks, right? Not so fast, says Brock University physiologist Stephen Cheung. While that certainly is the received wisdom, Cheung points out that top-performing athletes almost always speed past water stops in an effort to shave seconds off their time. “Elite marathon runners barely touch water, even […]

]]>A strenuous workout should be accompanied by frequent water breaks, right? Not so fast, says Brock University physiologist Stephen Cheung.

While that certainly is the received wisdom, Cheung points out that top-performing athletes almost always speed past water stops in an effort to shave seconds off their time.

Brock University physiologist Stephen Cheung says we don’t need as much water during exercise as previously thought. (courtesy: Stephen Cheung)

“Elite marathon runners barely touch water, even on a hot day,” he says. “And they lose more body weight through sweat (than others) and have higher core temperatures at the end of a race.”

In the mid-1990s, the American College of Sports Medicine recommended at least the full replacement of sweat loss during exercise. In 2007, it revised its guidelines to 400 to 800 millilitres of water per hour, and recommended dehydration be kept to less than 2 per cent of body weight for health and performance.

Yet when Cheung looked more closely at the studies backing these guidelines, he found a crucial flaw: they didn’t distinguish between being dehydrated and being thirsty. Instead, studies denied participants water while exercising in the heat, making them hyper-aware of their lack of hydration.

“Doing that changes not only your physical hydration status, but your psychology,” says Cheung, a competitive cyclist. “You are setting up a mental template for how hard you’re going to cycle or run.”

Wiping the template clean

So Cheung set up his own study, putting 11 competitive cyclists and triathletes through a 90-minute bike ride at half their aerobic capacity, followed by a 20 kilometre time trial. All participants had an IV in their arms, but only some received saline to replace lost sweat. The saline was warmed to body temperature so they couldn’t tell. All participants also sweated out at least 2 per cent of their body weight before the time trial.

Crucially, neither the participants nor the researchers knew if they were being hydrated. A paramedic tasked with monitoring their vital signs was the only one who knew, and he remained carefully hidden behind a curtain so as not to influence the outcome.

The results? There was no difference in performance between those receiving saline rehydration and those receiving nothing.

And there was no difference when Cheung further divided the group into those who were hydrated and not thirsty, hydrated but thirsty, dehydrated and thirsty and dehydrated but not thirsty.

The takeaway message, says Cheung, is that losing 2 to 3 per cent body weight due to dehydration after two hours of exercise does not impair performance.

“So drink according to your thirst, but don’t obsess about drinking or worry that you can’t perform at your best without fluids,” he says.

]]>http://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/07/breaking-for-water/feed/0Tribal watershttp://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/07/9842/
http://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/07/9842/#commentsMon, 20 Jul 2015 11:00:13 +0000http://yourontarioresearch.ca/?p=9842Dan Walters is interested in water — especially in its emotional, spiritual and social connections to First Nation communities. A professor of geography at Nipissing University, Walter’s current project assesses risk levels in drinking water and wastewater in the Dokis First Nation, located on the French River near Georgian Bay. Walters’ anthropological approach examines the […]

]]>Dan Walters is interested in water — especially in its emotional, spiritual and social connections to First Nation communities. A professor of geography at Nipissing University, Walter’s current project assesses risk levels in drinking water and wastewater in the Dokis First Nation, located on the French River near Georgian Bay.

Walters’ anthropological approach examines the community’s physical and cultural relationship to its tribal waters. It is, he admits, an approach at odds with Ottawa’s focus on the technological aspect of First Nations’ water systems.

“It goes beyond understanding about water that comes out of taps, ” he says. “The water quality in the ground affects medicinal plants and animals the Dokis Nation consume.”

Walters’s research is about making clear the gaps in assessments carried out by Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada (AANDC), and offering suggestions for filling them.

Muddied waters

For example, AANDC research is based on scores which distort what communities value and muddy the impact policies and funding have on water systems, he says.

A high score means a community has potential health and safety concerns while a low score implies the opposite. The scores are important because communities with high-risk levels are given priority funding.

But in the 2003, 2006 and 2010 federal assessments across Canada, First Nations’ risk scores changed with each new assessment. In 2003 there were 218 high-risk systems, in 2006 that number fell to 178, while in 2010 there were 314 high-risk systems, out of a total of 807 communities. Lost in these numbers was any understanding of whether individual community scores had changed over time, to say nothing of why some water systems improved while others were high-risk.

“We have no idea how many of those high-risk systems in 2006 are still high risk in 2010,” says Walters. “It is not clear whether the policies and funding have a direct influence on a community’s risk score.”

In Walters’ opinion, the government’s technical assessment is limited and contradictory. For instance, in some communities, drinking water was declared safe but the community still received a high-risk score.

“This creates a sense of fear in the community,” says Walters, adding that federal assessments also fail to recognize the multiple connections First Nations have with water.

In Dokis First Nation, he highlights the importance of spiritual and emotional perceptions of water. Along with Carly Dokis and Benjamin Kelly, anthropology and sociology professors from Nipissing University, Walters has been exploring the cultural and social connections that the Dokis’s have with their water.

Walters and his co-investigators are trying to create a new methodology for understanding these connections. It involves assessing how youth learn about the land, how community members are empowered, and how elders are encouraged to share stories about the past, all through community members’ connection with their territorial waters.

“I think that our method needs to be used in addition to the federal technical surveys,” he says. ” It is about respecting and understanding the value of water beyond just the technological understanding of water.”

]]>http://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/07/9842/feed/0Changing tideshttp://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/07/changing-tides/
http://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/07/changing-tides/#commentsMon, 13 Jul 2015 11:00:52 +0000http://yourontarioresearch.ca/?p=9835Tidal speeds in Nova Scotia’s Bay of Fundy can reach a staggering five metres per second. By comparison a very fast river flows at about two to three metres per second, “and you wouldn’t want to fall into a current like that,” says Queen’s University professor in coastal engineering Ryan Mulligan. So it stands to […]

]]>Tidal speeds in Nova Scotia’s Bay of Fundy can reach a staggering five metres per second. By comparison a very fast river flows at about two to three metres per second, “and you wouldn’t want to fall into a current like that,” says Queen’s University professor in coastal engineering Ryan Mulligan.

So it stands to reason that anything slowing that flow would have significant impact on the ecosystem. That includes tidal turbines affixed to the ocean floor, a form of renewable electricity under consideration by Nova Scotia’s department of energy.

The Bay of Fundy has the highest tides in the world. Queen’s University coastal engineer Ryan Mulligan is studying the environmental impacts of harnessing that power with tidal turbines. (Andrea Schaffer flickr)

Mulligan’s research is providing important insights into how such a field of turbines might affect the bay’s powerful currents and its resulting impact on the environment.

Tidal turbines work much like wind turbines, the key difference being that tidal currents, not wind, drive the blades that generate electricity. Also, tides are reliable and predictable, unlike wind or solar power, making this form of renewal energy hugely appealing, says Mulligan.

Nova Scotia has been operating North America’s only tidal power generating station near the town of Annapolis Royal since 1984. But critics say its design is not as environmentally-friendly as it could be.

The system relies on tides to fill a human-made reservoir from which water is released as needed to generate electricity. The reservoir has caused river bank erosion and the dam has created a lethal trap for some marine wildlife.

Turbines affixed to the ocean floor are a more appealing option. They don’t involve flooding a basin and can be designed to allow marine life to swim past. Even so, they are not without environmental consequences.

Forecasting tidal flows

The difficulty is that there are only a few such installations in the world — most of which are in the United Kingdom — and research into their impact is still in its early stages.

This makes Mulligan’s work all the more timely. He has developed a sophisticated computer model using existing data on tidal speeds and suspended sediments in the Bay of Fundy. This gives him a baseline against which to measure the impact of a field of turbines on the bottom of the bay.

His computer model estimates the turbines’ impact by simulating a semi-permeable barrier across Minas Passage, an area of the bay where currents are particularly strong. At their maximum, the currents in the passage could generate about seven GW of power, enough to power roughly 2.5 million homes.

That would require a full-scale array of several hundred turbines, which Mulligan’s model estimates would result in a drop of nearly 30 per cent in the speed of tidal flows.

“This is not a negligible change,” he says.

The problem with settling sediments

Mulligan has calculated that the reduced flow is likely to lead to a decrease of about 70 per cent in suspended sediments in the water rushing through the passage. Those sediments will instead settle out, leading to silting in adjacent channels, shipping harbours and ecologically-productive tidal flats.

This is crucial information for other researchers — marine ecologists, harbour engineers and fisheries scientists — who can now build on Mulligan’s findings to fine tune predictions about local environmental impacts.

“Taking energy out of the system impacts the physical environment,” says Mulligan. “It will change the habitat and the species that can live in these places. It could also affect the socioeconomic environment — fishing, aquaculture, navigation. We need to know these things.”

]]>http://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/07/changing-tides/feed/0Stories from the roadhttp://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/07/curiosity-cruiser-stories-from-the-road/
http://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/07/curiosity-cruiser-stories-from-the-road/#commentsThu, 09 Jul 2015 11:00:56 +0000http://yourontarioresearch.ca/?p=10276Sarah Binns is part of our Research Matters team touring the province this summer to spread the word about research breakthroughs at Ontario’s 21 publicly funded universities. This summer Alex, Katie, Badri, and I have been travelling from Thunder Bay to Ottawa, and Windsor to Sudbury to promote the amazing research happening at universities across […]

]]>Sarah Binns is part of our Research Matters team touring the province this summer to spread the word about research breakthroughs at Ontario’s 21 publicly funded universities.

This summer Alex, Katie, Badri, and I have been travelling from Thunder Bay to Ottawa, and Windsor to Sudbury to promote the amazing research happening at universities across the province. We’re highlighting 50 game-changing innovations from the last 100 years through fun research-themed trivia.

Research Matters’ Curiosity Cruiser team is hopscotching across the province this summer.

There are some truly impressive game-changers on our list, but the innovations that people feel most connected to are often the ones we least expected. The most memorable moments happen when someone shares with us a personal connection to the research we’re promoting. In Sudbury, we were amazed by the city’s pride about the inclusion of the SNOLAB in our list. It seems everyone either knows someone who worked there, worked there themselves, helped construct, or visited the underground lab. We’ve also met potato breeder Gary Johnston’s neighbour, and UOttawa law students who took classes with Michael Geist. And countless professors and researchers have dropped by to talk with us about future game-changing discoveries they are working on.

For me, the most impressive feature of our list of game-changing research is that its showcases the full breadth of research from a wide variety of disciplines. As classics graduate I am incredibly pleased with the inclusion of historians and theorists, as they most accurately reflect my own research experience. Historian Margaret MacMillan has helped us understand the influence of past events on present policy and international relations, while literary critic Northrop Frye revolutionized the field when he outlined a highly structured, systematic theory of criticism that exists independent of literature itself. Communications theorist Marshall McLuhan made his mark by examining how media changes our behaviours and perceptions according to the way information is structured. I have enjoy sharing their stories and the unexpected ways in which their work has impacted Ontario, Canada, and the world.

Which of our game-changers do you most connect with? Stop by and share your research stories with us at one of the following upcoming festivals:

]]>http://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/07/curiosity-cruiser-stories-from-the-road/feed/0Cleaning up our acthttp://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/07/cleaning-up-our-act/
http://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/07/cleaning-up-our-act/#commentsWed, 08 Jul 2015 11:00:41 +0000http://yourontarioresearch.ca/?p=9858Separating water from sludge is a fundamental step in any sewage treatment system and getting this process right can substantially reduce costs and environmental impacts. That’s exactly what Carleton University engineer Banu Örmeci is doing. She is in the midst of getting patents in several countries for a new technology that efficiently “dewaters” sewage sludge. […]

]]>Separating water from sludge is a fundamental step in any sewage treatment system and getting this process right can substantially reduce costs and environmental impacts.

That’s exactly what Carleton University engineer Banu Örmeci is doing. She is in the midst of getting patents in several countries for a new technology that efficiently “dewaters” sewage sludge.

This sludge is in the process of being dewatered at a wastewater treatment plant in North Carolina. (Banu Örmeci)

Sewage sludge is a semi-solid slurry that after being treated for pathogens is disposed of in one of three ways: it is spread as fertilizer on farmers’ fields, incinerated, or landfilled. The less water sludge contains the lower its volume and weight, which reduces the cost of hauling it to fields or landfill sites. In the case of incineration, less water means less fossil fuel is needed to dry and burn it.

Perfecting the dewatering system can also reduce the use of chemical compounds designed to separate water from sludge. These compounds are called polymers — substances whose molecules are made of long chains of repeating groups of atoms.

Polymers used in dewatering sludge are toxic to aquatic ecosystems and suspected of causing adverse health effects in humans. That’s important because water separated from sludge is released back into the environment. While this water is treated for pathogens, the polymers can’t be removed.

“There is no other option at the moment,” says Örmeci “But we are looking at alternatives.”

Solid, dewatered sludge is either incinerated or used as fertilizer on agricultural land. (Banu Örmeci)

In the meantime, her technology lets plant managers determine exactly how much polymer is needed to do the job, minimizing its concentration in both solid sludge and discharged water.

Her system relies on a spectrophotometer, an instrument that measures how much light a substance absorbs, which in turn lets researchers know how much of that substance is present. In this case, she is measuring how much light polymers absorb in water retrieved from sludge. This gives her an accurate, and immediate, reading of the concentration of these polymers in the water.

Plant managers can then react immediately: if the reading is too high, they can dial down their polymer use. If it is too low, they can boost it.

Getting on the right wavelength

While water treatment operators use spectrophotometers to detect concentrations of organic matter, they don’t currently use them to detect polymers. That’s because their spectrophotometers measure the absorbance of light at a wavelength of 254 nanometres and polymers don’t absorb this wavelength. But Örmeci’s research showed that they do absorb wavelengths of 191 nanometres.

“The nice thing about this system is there is already an instrument that exists. We just have to modify its wavelength,” she says.

More importantly, she can use the modified spectrophotometer to determine the relationship between how much polymer is needed to dewater sludge and its minimum concentration in treated water released to the environment.

She and her team perfected the system at three wastewater treatment plants in the United States and are now working with GreenCentre Canada, a federally funded program that aims to move university research to the marketplace. They are also in talks with an international wastewater company to commercialize their technology.

“We started this just three years ago,” says Örmeci. “We now have both lab-scale and full-scale results, and the project is a great example of how fundamental research can lead to new and innovative applications and products.”

]]>http://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/07/cleaning-up-our-act/feed/0Watershed findinghttp://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/07/watershed-finding/
http://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/07/watershed-finding/#commentsThu, 02 Jul 2015 11:00:14 +0000http://yourontarioresearch.ca/?p=9822Ancient carbon buried deep in the soil is leaching into rivers around the world as a result of human development — a finding with significant implications for climate change. Trent University professor and aquatic ecologist Maggie Xenopoulos was part of a team of Canadian and American researchers who recently uncovered the extent of the problem. […]

]]>Ancient carbon buried deep in the soil is leaching into rivers around the world as a result of human development — a finding with significant implications for climate change.

Trent University aquatic ecologist Maggie Xenopoulos and her team measured the age of dissolved organic carbon in 135 rivers around the world. Their findings may help explain an imbalance in the global carbon budget. (Maggie Xenopoulos)

Trent University professor and aquatic ecologist Maggie Xenopoulos was part of a team of Canadian and American researchers who recently uncovered the extent of the problem. They showed how disturbing soil for agriculture and urban development is releasing carbon buried for thousands of years.

Carbon in soil comes from decayed plants and, in the case of ancient carbon, is sequestered deep in the earth where it is locked away from the atmosphere. But now this old carbon is leaching into rivers where aquatic bacteria can consume it. Just like people, bacteria don’t use everything they eat. Whatever doesn’t fuel their growth or reproduction, the bacteria expel as waste. One of those waste products is carbon dioxide (CO2), which can then be emitted into the atmosphere where it may contribute to climate change.

Xenopoulos’s research brings to light an important but largely unconsidered contribution to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions: development in watersheds.

“The effect (on CO2 emissions) is like driving a car, but nobody sees it that way,” says Xenopoulos. “The global carbon budget isn’t balanced. This could be one reason why, but more studies are needed.”

Confirming suspicions

While many scientists suspected development in watersheds released ancient carbon into rivers, and from there into the atmosphere, no one had compiled a database to prove it. That is until Xenopoulos and her colleagues tallied up the age of dissolved organic carbon leaching into 135 rivers around the world, including about a dozen in Ontario.

They used a technique called radiocarbon dating, which estimates the age of organic material based on how much carbon 14 it contains. Carbon 14 is a radioactive form of the element which decays at a known rate. Measuring how much is left in a river’s dissolved organic carbon gives a fairly accurate estimate of its age.

The researchers found the age of dissolved organic carbon in rivers increased with population density and development. Extrapolating their findings to rivers around the world, Xenopoulos and her team estimate that in watersheds with human disturbance old carbon could account for 3 to 9 per cent of the total dissolved organic carbon in rivers.

“We are returning this old carbon into the modern carbon cycle, which should instead stay buried deep into the soils,” says Xenopoulos. She proposes a simple solution: “Apply better management practices and keep wetlands and riparian areas healthy.”

Alison Ng, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Waterloo’s Centre for Contact Lens Research (CCLR), studied what happens when eyeliner is applied to the “waterline” — the inner part of the eyelash line. She found the eyeliner moves on from the waterline to the tear film — the thin, wet layer that protects the eye.

In her research, Ng captured more than 200 frames of video at timed intervals of her subject’s eyes. She and her research team then used specialized software to count every tiny particle of glitter that appeared on the surface of the eye and the results were clear: when we apply makeup along the waterline, eyeliner moves into the tear film.

Contact lenses compound the problem

While that’s not good news for anyone, Ng’s research showed that the eyeliner gets flushed away by your tears within a couple of hours. But people who wear contact lenses run bigger risks because the makeup can get trapped and affect vision.

Lenses worn for multiple days are especially problematic because they continually re-introduce and collect unwanted debris, cautions Ng.

“This can create cloudiness in contact lenses and disrupt vision,” she says. “For anyone who wears heavy makeup or enjoys regularly applying beauty products around the eye, I would recommend daily disposable lenses.”

Anyone with dry eyes — thanks to genetics, environment, or staring at a screen all day — may also be susceptible to more noticeable irritation, Ng says. Her study used healthy females without contact lenses as a baseline, but the connection to dry eyes and contacts is obvious.

Watch for redness and itchiness

Ng conducted the research while completing her PhD at Cardiff University in Wales, U.K. The findings appear in the journal Eye and Contact Lens, the official peer-reviewed journal of the Contact Lens Association of Ophthalmologists.

Redness, itchiness, or irritation are all signs that it may be time to change your makeup routine to keep your eyes clear and healthy, she says.

“You have to think about cosmetic use at all stages. Consider which products you choose, how you apply the products and how you remove them at bedtime,” says Ng.

Prevent bacterial transfer by sharpening eye pencils thoroughly before each use. Twist-up products are tricky, but manageable, says Ng. She recommends that people who favour this style of eyeliner trim a small piece of eyeliner from the end of the product before every application.

]]>http://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/06/eye-makeup-can-cloud-vision/feed/0End of skinny models?http://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/06/end-of-the-super-skinny-model/
http://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/06/end-of-the-super-skinny-model/#commentsMon, 22 Jun 2015 11:00:39 +0000http://yourontarioresearch.ca/?p=9599Women are ready to see fashion models that look like them. New Brock University research shows size six models do a better job of marketing products, especially to women with low self-esteem. The research by Kai-Yu Wang, a marketing professor at Brock’s Goodman School of Business, shows that fashion brands can substitute their size zero […]

]]>Women are ready to see fashion models that look like them. New Brock University research shows size six models do a better job of marketing products, especially to women with low self-esteem.

The research by Kai-Yu Wang, a marketing professor at Brock’s Goodman School of Business, shows that fashion brands can substitute their size zero models with average sized models without impacting either the model attractiveness rating or the product evaluation.

Brock University’s Kai-Yu Wang found substituting size zero models with average sized ones has no effect on either the model’s attractiveness rating or the product’s evaluation. (serakate, flickr.com)

“With the debate around the use of super-skinny models, we wanted to find out if women preferred size zero models over average sized models” says Wang.

In April, France passed legislation to ban excessively thin fashion models amid concerns over the impact they have on body image, self-esteem and eating disorders. The ban came after a similar moves by Israel, Italy and Spain.

Wang and his co-author completed three studies to test their theories about whether women aged 18-25 preferred average size models or size zero models and the role that brand and self-esteem play in their preferences. They looked at both established companies with a history of using size zero models as well as fictional new brands.

Defying expectations

“We expected that when they looked at print ads for an established brand, like Gucci, we would find that our participants would prefer the skinny models over the average sized model,” says Wang. “In fact, we found that average sized models could be used interchangeably with the size zero models with minimal impact on the evaluation of the model and the product.”

For new fashion brands that are just starting their advertising campaigns, they should hire average sized models, the research shows.

This is because new brands are not associated with any particular cues,” says Wang. “Consumers tend to use accessible information (people around us) to make a judgment.

Thus, they like average size models more than super-skinny models.” In addition, the research also found that when new fashion brands are advertising, low self-esteem participants prefer average sized models over the skinny models. Such an effect was not observed among high self-esteem participants.

The study was co-authored with Xuemei Bian, a senior lecturer in marketing at the KentBusinessSchool, University of Kent, U.K.

The research paper, “Are size zero female models always more effective than average-sized ones? Depends on brand and self-esteem!” will be published in an upcoming issue of the European Journal of Marketing.

]]>http://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/06/end-of-the-super-skinny-model/feed/0Opening closet doorshttp://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/06/opening-closet-doors/
http://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/06/opening-closet-doors/#commentsMon, 15 Jun 2015 11:00:23 +0000http://yourontarioresearch.ca/?p=9622Whether your closet is lined with designer suits, thrift-store finds, or well-worn sports jerseys, Ben Barry would like to peek inside. Barry is an assistant professor of equity, diversity and inclusion at Ryerson University’s School of Fashion and a visiting scholar at New York’s New School University. His research offers fresh insight into intersections among […]

Barry is an assistant professor of equity, diversity and inclusion at Ryerson University’s School of Fashion and a visiting scholar at New York’s New School University. His research offers fresh insight into intersections among gender, fashion and consumption.

Barry has published several studies about how social norms hold back men from experimenting with the way they dress. He has also tackled a

This model was part of a showcase of men’s diversity in fashion, with Ryerson University’s Ben Barry acting as co-creative director. The images were published by Herringbone magazine. (Andy Lee, Herringbone Magazine)

topic that has been studied intensively when it comes to women, but mostly overlooked in men: how idealized models in the media affect self-esteem.

He sees this topic as a wake-up call for advertisers as well as the media in general: “Men identify with models that reflect their shapes, ages and races, and favourably perceive advertisements with these models because they can picture themselves in the clothing.”

His current two-year project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, looks at how men use fashion to deconstruct and re-imagine their gendered identities.

Part of this research involves ‘closet interviews’ with 50 men, aged 18 to 92, asking them to open their closet doors and share how the clothes inside came to be there. How men’s choices reflect feelings about identities around sexuality, race, class, body type, disability and age are providing fascinating insights into the nature and diversity of men’s contemporary gendered identities.

(Andy Lee, Herringbone Magazine)

The 92-year old man, for example, says he buys women’s jeans since his hip replacement because they provide more comfort after his surgery.

Another man, a grade six teacher, combines traditional male and female elements in his outfits, such as a sequin top paired with basketball shorts, to challenge his students’ conceptions of gender identity.

Conventional masculinity flawed

“Fashion is powerful and has always been gendered a feminine thing,” Barry explains. “But men’s fashion consumption has been growing at twice the rate. I’m interested in how fashion can unravel and challenge traditional gender norms.

”Understanding these issues is more important than ever, he says, because the conventional ideal of masculinity – muscular, thin and Caucasian – is unattainable for the majority of men.“These rigid gender codes are harmful to men’s wellbeing because they constrain their behaviours, limit their potential as well as exclude men whose differences posit them outside of the conventional masculine norms,” he says.

Social media, however, is making it easier for men to explore their own sense of fashion, he says. Blogs, Instagram and Facebook give them access to a non-threatening way to see what other men are doing and experimenting with.

In year two of his project, Barry plans to turn the traditional runway fashion show on its head: men in his study will put on a fashion show featuring their own clothes.

“Ultimately,” he says, “It’s about how we can create and recreate ourselves through fashion.”

Research Matters highlights Professor Ben Barry’s research as one of 50 game-changing discoveries to come out of Ontario universities over the past 100 years. Learn more and vote for your favourite breakthrough here.

]]>http://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/06/opening-closet-doors/feed/0Manufacturing materialismhttp://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/06/manufacturing-materialism/
http://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/06/manufacturing-materialism/#commentsMon, 08 Jun 2015 11:00:19 +0000http://yourontarioresearch.ca/?p=9744People who watch a lot of TV are generally less concerned about the environment than those who watch very little. When Jennifer Good came across this research as a graduate student in the 1990s, her first question was “why?” Some research suggested this was because of “time displacement.” In other words, more TV viewing meant […]

]]>People who watch a lot of TV are generally less concerned about the environment than those who watch very little. When Jennifer Good came across this research as a graduate student in the 1990s, her first question was “why?”

Some research suggested this was because of “time displacement.” In other words, more TV viewing meant less time spent outdoors and feeling connected to it. Other research said this was because prime-time programming doesn’t generally show the environment — that it is “symbolically annihilated.”

Brock University’s Jennifer Good found that TV viewing, and screen time on our phones, computers and tablets, increases levels of materialism. (U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission)

Good, now a professor in the department of Communication, Popular Culture and Film at Brock University, suspected there was another explanation. She wondered if the lack of environmental concern had something to do with how TV viewing encourages materialism. Perhaps television helps us see ourselves primarily as consumers of clothes, cars, gadgets and kitchenware.

“When we understand our lives as related to consumption, we assess who we are based on what we own, what we wear, what we drive,” she says. “The Earth then becomes the means by which we acquire these things.”

She thought maybe when this happens, other understandings of the Earth — as a collection of ecosystems, or a provider of clean water and air — fade from our consciousness.

Good wanted to research relationships between TV viewing, materialism and attitudes towards the environment. So in a series of studies, and later in her 2013 book, Television and the Earth: Not a Love Story, she conducted surveys that showed materialism does in fact mediate the relationship between TV viewing and attitudes about the natural environment.

In her work, she examined not just traditional TV viewing but also screen time on our phones, computers and tablets. In one study, she surveyed two groups of 1,000 people. One group was a random sample of Americans, while the other was a random sample of Americans belonging to a national environmental organization.

Good asked questions about TV viewing habits, levels of materialism and attitudes toward the environment while controlling for variables such as sex, age, income and education.

In both groups, she found that those who watched more TV were less concerned about the environment and more materialistic. And as one’s materialism increased, one’s concern for the environment decreased.

“What we’ve learned we can unlearn”

“The effects I saw were small, but consistent,” says Good. “TV affects our understanding of what makes us who we are and our understanding of the environment. But I would be hesitant to say TV forces us go out and do things.”

Good also highlights that it’s possible to want the latest fashions, the most prestigious cars and coolest electronics all while thinking of yourself as an environmentalist: you can choose to buy only environmentally-friendly products.

“But it’s still about endless economic growth and it’s not sustainable,” says Good, pointing out that many products marketed as “green” are not truly green. And even those that tread lightly on the Earth have an impact.

Still, Good insists on an optimistic long-term view: “Our relationship with our ‘stuff’ is new in the context of human history. We learned materialism and what we’ve learned we can unlearn,” she says.

]]>http://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/06/manufacturing-materialism/feed/0Fashion statementhttp://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/06/fashion-statement/
http://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/06/fashion-statement/#commentsMon, 01 Jun 2015 11:00:54 +0000http://yourontarioresearch.ca/?p=9618Katarina Kuruc, a doctoral candidate at Carleton’s School of Journalism and Communication, studies the importance of fashion as a form of visual communication in otherwise restrictive social systems. Kuruc immigrated to Canada from the former communist Czechoslovakia in the late 1980s. Her personal experience of living in a communist state, together with her exposure to its […]

]]>Katarina Kuruc, a doctoral candidate at Carleton’s School of Journalism and Communication, studies the importance of fashion as a form of visual communication in otherwise restrictive social systems. Kuruc immigrated to Canada from the former communist Czechoslovakia in the late 1980s. Her personal experience of living in a communist state, together with her exposure to its limited fashion industry, led to her dissertation topic.

We feature here her award-winning Storyteller video for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in which she details why her research matters.

]]>http://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/06/fashion-statement/feed/0The magic of metaphorshttp://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/05/metaphors-boost-empathy/
http://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/05/metaphors-boost-empathy/#commentsTue, 19 May 2015 10:00:17 +0000http://yourontarioresearch.ca/?p=9536Love is a battlefield, according to a 1983 hit by Pat Benatar. But there’s much more to it than that. The metaphor at the heart of this song – or any metaphor, for that matter – has the power to elicit empathy. According to a new study by Western Psychology professor Albert Katz and colleague […]

]]>Love is a battlefield, according to a 1983 hit by Pat Benatar. But there’s much more to it than that. The metaphor at the heart of this song – or any metaphor, for that matter – has the power to elicit empathy.

According to a new study by Western Psychology professor Albert Katz and colleague Andrea Bowes, reading metaphors significantly increases one’s ability to interpret the emotional state of another individual simply by looking at the person’s eyes.

In other words, reading, using and interpreting metaphors has the potential to bring us closer to someone else.

“To understand metaphor, you have to understand the intent of another person, partly because there’s an ambiguity there, and (the person) could mean to say multiple things,” said Katz, who is a cognitive psychologist.

“There might be something in the comprehension of the sentence itself which orients you to try and figure out why would someone say that, or what do they mean when they say that, and that might be what is still active (in the mind) when doing the eye test.”

Measuring emotional insight

The ‘eye test’ Katz refers to is the measure he used with undergraduate students as part of the study. Katz and Bowes conducted three different experiments, asking students to read sentences and paragraph-long short stories, some of which contained a metaphor, and some of which were expressed entirely in plain language. Immediately after, students were asked to look at an image of a person’s eyes and pick one of four adjectives to indicate the emotion expressed in the eyes.

“What we tend to find is, when people read the metaphor, they actually did better on (the eye test), which is ostensibly an unrelated task,” Katz said.

Experts refer to one’s ability to understand what another person might be feeling or thinking as ‘Theory of Mind.’ The test used by Katz and Bowes to measure Theory of Mind is called the Reading the Mind in the Eye Test (RMET), in which participants have to correctly identify the emotions or mental state displayed in black-and-white photographs of 36 pairs of eyes.

The general public, barring certain cognitive conditions or diagnoses, including forms of autism, can be expected to perform reasonably well on the RMET. But metaphor appears to boost the results, according to Katz and Bowes’ study.

“What we found is, students who read the metaphor did better on this task,” Katz said.

While reading literature is often cited for higher levels of empathy, reading metaphors, specifically, is responsible for this boost, Katz explained.

]]>http://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/05/metaphors-boost-empathy/feed/0Dissecting Disneyhttp://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/05/dissecting-disneys-box-office-gold/
http://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/05/dissecting-disneys-box-office-gold/#commentsThu, 14 May 2015 10:00:52 +0000http://yourontarioresearch.ca/?p=9510Disney struck box office gold in 2013 with the animated feature Frozen, which has the distinction of being the highest-grossing animated feature and the fifth highest-grossing film of all time. Its Academy Award-winning song “Let it Go” struck a chord with kids, and is the subject of online tributes and parodies. We spoke to University of […]

]]>Disney struck box office gold in 2013 with the animated feature Frozen, which has the distinction of being the highest-grossing animated feature and the fifth highest-grossing film of all time. Its Academy Award-winning song “Let it Go” struck a chord with kids, and is the subject of online tributes and parodies. We spoke to University of Toronto Professor Nic Sammond of the Cinema Studies Institute at Innis College about the movie’s incredible success. The author of Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960, Sammond studies the cultural history and political economy of popular film and media.

It’s designed to create strong emotional relationships between parents and children. This is what’s genius about what Disney does — some would say evil genius, others might say good. Its plots often revolve around the separation of the parent figure from the child. The child has to go through a transformation where it learns what its shortcomings are, what its strengths are, and rely on friends to help it and bring it back together with the parent. The parent has to suffer though letting the child go so the child can stand or fall on its own two feet. This is a constant struggle between parents and children in life, and Disney sneaks right in there, knowing this is an emotional hook for both parents and children. In the case of Frozen, it’s particularly about the relationship between mothers and children. This is one of Disney’s attempts at feminism. It does still have beautiful princesses. It still ends with the ideal marriage. It doesn’t completely break the mould, but it does allow at least the illusion of choice for the protagonist.

A lot has been made of the fact that the act of true love at the end is between sisters—there is no man involved.

Yes, and that has been repeated in Maleficent, which is also a Disney movie. It’s not about Prince Charming; it’s about family love. This is a big emotional hook for both children and parents. The formula has to undergo change. If it stays the same, it becomes brittle and doesn’t match the sensibilities of the people watching the movie. In Frozen, the parents die and then you have, as often you do, evil surrogates that have to be dealt with. But you also have her sister and the sense that family will endure after the parents are gone. This is something that resonates with parents, to know that siblings will look after each other.

You’ve written a book about Disney’s marketing to children. Can you give us your findings in a nutshell?

I wrote about Disney’s beginnings in the late 1920s and early 1930s. At that time, the Production Code was just starting. The Production Code, which existed roughly from 1930 to 1968, was a set of rules for what you could and couldn’t do on the screen, and it was premised on the notion that children are susceptible to the messages in films. It was buttressed by a group of scientific studies published between 1933 and 1935 that were popularized in women’s magazines, speaking in alarmist terms about the effect of movies on children.

Disney took advantage of this concern, suggesting that it was good for children. It latched onto the fear that movies are damaging. There was an underlying anti-Semitism to some of those messages — as in, the Jewish Hollywood cabal was going to corrupt your good Protestant children. Disney was not Jewish and was often praised for being solidly middle American, from Missouri and Chicago. The rest could be inferred.

The company built a reputation around an emerging science of child development, and it weathered a significant change in those theories. Before World War II, most of the theories were predicated on behaviourism, which is the notion of input in, behaviour out. Pavlov’s dog is the classic example. That fell out of favour after the war because of the Nazis and the Russians. They were seen as behaviourists who raised generations of evil children. So there was a shift to a Freudian model, popularized by Dr. Spock, that was all about letting the child develop on its own. Disney very adroitly shifted from one discourse to the other and still was seen as good for children.

And what about Disney’s marketing today?

They have had to keep up with an increasingly sophisticated market of both parents and children. There are a lot more jokes written for parents and for sophisticated children and a lot of attention paid to issues around identity formation — race, gender, sexuality. Disney has become one of the most gay-friendly companies in the United States. It still has a hard time having out characters, but in the way it markets itself more generally, it does a good job. It’s tried to take on race, for example, in The Princess and the Frog and in Mulan. A lot of people have critiqued the company for this — it doesn’t necessarily get it right—but there is such a reserve of good will for Disney that even when it doesn’t quite get it right, it’s still seen as doing good.

]]>http://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/05/dissecting-disneys-box-office-gold/feed/0Entertaining elephantshttp://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/05/spotlight-on-circus-elephants/
http://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/05/spotlight-on-circus-elephants/#commentsMon, 11 May 2015 10:00:06 +0000http://yourontarioresearch.ca/?p=9501After more than a century of parading in pink tutus with dogs balancing on their backs, elephants in the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey’s circus are preparing to take their final bow. By 2018, the star performers will retire from the spotlight to live out their lives in an elephant conservation centre. These days, […]

]]>After more than a century of parading in pink tutus with dogs balancing on their backs, elephants in the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey’s circus are preparing to take their final bow. By 2018, the star performers will retire from the spotlight to live out their lives in an elephant conservation centre.

These days, fewer and fewer circuses use elephants and their stage exit mirrors the public’s increased empathy toward these animals. But studying their heyday as performers reveals important insights about their audience, in other words, about us as consumer of entertainment.

Elephants were symbolic of the expense of the circus, which was meant to flatter the audience, says University of Guelph historian Susan Nance. (Library of Congress)

Enter Susan Nance, an associate professor of U.S. history at the University of Guelph whose research concentrates on entertainment, from vaudeville to street performers. Her interest in circus elephants was piqued after she uncovered “shocking things that circus historians don’t like to talk about,” says Nance, who set out to change the way historians look at animals.

In 2013, she published Entertaining Elephants, in which she investigates the history of elephants as circus performers.

In her book, she details how their popularity reached a high point in the nineteenth century when big-name circuses competed with each other to import more and more elephants to satisfy audiences’ craving for spectacle.

“A circus’ elephants were symbolic of the expense of the show, which was meant to flatter the audience,” says Nance.

Gymnasts and genteel families

However, satisfying the audience’s need for the incredible meant that elephants paid a hefty price. The large and majestic animals were trained to balance on their hind legs and beg like a dog, stand on their front legs like a gymnast, roll a barrel with all four legs or sit at a dining room table like a genteel family.

“Circuses imported and exploited juvenile elephants, and disposed of them when they became too expensive or too destructive,” says Nance. “Any behaviour that did not add value to the circus, they tried to suppress and stop.”

Audiences’ fascination with circus animals continued well into the twentieth century, but with the advent of popular wildlife documentaries in the mid 1900s, people’s attitudes toward animals shifted.

“Film footage could explain wild animals as individuals in a supportive, gregarious community,” says Nance. “That built empathy, in particular for elephants, as they are so much like us with strong family connections, broad emotional range, long memories, intelligence and dexterity.”

Nance says empathy for animals escalated with the increasing realisation humankind was to blame for the dwindling number of species in the wild, including Asian and African elephants. With the advent of the Internet, people were also able to see footage of animal cruelty – such as trainers beating elephants.

Although Nance says that circus elephants should be phased out, she notes that people seem to empathic only towards animals whose existence is threatened. When animals are mass-produced, such as chickens ­and pigs, people ignore their needs.

“I wonder if that element of extinction is the big difference,” she muses.

]]>http://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/05/spotlight-on-circus-elephants/feed/0Storytime 2.0http://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/05/storytime-will-never-be-the-same/
http://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/05/storytime-will-never-be-the-same/#commentsFri, 08 May 2015 10:00:37 +0000http://yourontarioresearch.ca/?p=9547A co-founder of York University’s Future Cinema Lab, Caitlin Fisher’s research investigates the future of narrative through explorations of interactive storytelling and interactive cinema in Augmented Reality environments. In this guest blog, Fisher offers us a glimpse into her work’s significance for Canada’s culture and entertainment sector. I like to tell stories. My research involves […]

]]>A co-founder of York University’s Future Cinema Lab, Caitlin Fisher’s research investigates the future of narrative through explorations of interactive storytelling and interactive cinema in Augmented Reality environments. In this guest blog, Fisher offers us a glimpse into her work’s significance for Canada’s culture and entertainment sector.

I like to tell stories. My research involves working with emerging technologies to explore and contribute to future storytelling forms and new tools for writers and artists. My students and I create future cinema, future novels, develop custom software, work in game engines and build prototypes of things that do not yet have names.

Augmented reality fairy stones for children 2011 (Augmented Reality Lab at York University)

My current funded research involves developing techniques, narrative strategies and tools for use in Augmented Reality (AR) environments, research increasingly important for Canada’s culture and entertainment sectors, as augmented reality is poised to become a $200 billion global industry.

Unlike a virtual reality environment that strives for a totally immersive visual world (like Oculus Rift), augmented reality augments the physical world with digital artefacts while insisting that the user maintain a sense of presence in the real. In AR, virtual images are registered to the physical and overlaid in real time to create the augmented experience, typically via head-mounted displays (like Meta Glass) or mobile phones.

Augmented reality storytelling departs from earlier practices in a critically significant and complicating way: the physical world can matter in these pieces. Augmented reality will break through this decade not because it makes us catch our breath the way some virtual reality environments do (even today’s cutting edge AR tools are only just beginning to capture the promise of this technology) but, rather, because of the ways in which the real world is present in these works and the way the physical and the digital work together to tell the story. In AR, a location or object can carry so much of the weight of the narrative, making AR mobile fiction, for example, more like film or immersive theatre than like a book. This is part of the new toolkit for writers. And my film students love the idea that one future form for the moving image might involve a rich, moving dreamscape dropped like a palimpsest over an entire neighbourhood.

Indeed, it’s thrilling, as artists and researchers and inventors, to live in a moment with the unprecedented capacity to bring together the physical and the virtual, to transform our relationships to objects and landscapes through the addition of computer-generated information, and to work in a context in which conventions have yet to be established. Industrial applications and advertising are key economic drivers of AR technology, but the canvas AR offers poets and screenwriters and filmmakers and directors is vast and emergent.

In the Augmented Reality Lab at York University, a STEAM (STEM +art) lab I founded over a decade ago, my students and I create spatialized mobile storyworlds and fairy houses and haunted object tabletop theatres in part because of the pleasure of working with new expressive tools — but also because it is important to make and think alongside new digital texts in order to better understand what constitutes a successful, compelling and emotionally rich experience in these spaces. This research helps us to articulate what kind of future we want even as we are actively creating it.

My research and experiments to make some of the first, full scale augmented reality long-form storyworlds is part of a larger collaborative research project with University of Toronto computer engineer Steve Mann, entitled “Augmented reality glass: sousveillance, wearable computing and new literary forms.” Steve Mann is widely understood to be ‘the father’ of both augmented reality and wearable computing and a computer science pioneer who has developed the next generation of ARGlass head-mounted-display technology, Meta, a made-in-Canada technology that surpasses the more widely known Google Glass.

Like so much work in this field, our project crosses institutional and disciplinary boundaries, the public sector/private sector divide, brings together making and thinking and explores both expressive tools and receptive viewing situations. And it is as much about people and beauty and play and creativity and digital awareness as it is about technology.

The concept videos promoting AR so often suggest a world filled only with opportunities for increased marketing, task efficiency, networking and work days without end. But my research and creative practice seeks to broaden what might be possible and desirable here: to explore AR as a future storytelling machine that carries inside it some of the foundational dreams of experimental creative practice. In so doing it challenges students with a diversity of skills and critically-engaged perspectives, from both the arts and the sciences, to come together in an utterly necessary way to create and play and fail and iterate and, in so doing, invent both future forms and contribute to a future for AR that is not only useful, but also beautiful.

]]>http://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/05/storytime-will-never-be-the-same/feed/0Counter-culture warriorshttp://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/05/embracing-counter-culture-warriors/
http://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/05/embracing-counter-culture-warriors/#commentsMon, 04 May 2015 10:00:07 +0000http://yourontarioresearch.ca/?p=9497Gary Genosko wants you to see your big toe as a powerful tool in the counter-culture movement. This underappreciated appendage, he tells us, can even hack a casino. In fact, in the late 1970s, a group of creative graduate students used data sent by tapping their big toes on a micro-switch hidden in their shoes […]

]]>Gary Genosko wants you to see your big toe as a powerful tool in the counter-culture movement. This underappreciated appendage, he tells us, can even hack a casino. In fact, in the late 1970s, a group of creative graduate students used data sent by tapping their big toes on a micro-switch hidden in their shoes to beat the odds at roulette.

Genosko, a professor in and director of the Communication and Digital Media Studies program at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, also insists that a hospital-gowned patient sneaking into forbidden rooms, trailing his IV pole behind him, can be a counter-culture warrior.

Canadian Jeff Chapman (known as Ninjalicious), was an “urban explorer” who developed his interest in off-limit areas while a cancer patient. Genosko says Chapman, and others like him, are “unofficial cartographers of the city.” Chapman published stories of his explorations in his zine Infiltration (small, self-published magazines – another strong counter-culture movement) to showcase the forbidden side of our cities’ buildings and monuments.

Chapman and the enteprising graduate students are exactly the type of radicals that Genosko studies. He is fascinated by the way technoculture both elevates and subverts established powers by taking the road less travelled and challenging cultural norms.

“It’s a form of culture-jamming,” he explains. “It’s the act of converting a commercial and institutional message to be subversive of its original intent. The magazine Adbusters would be an example of this in print.”

Genosko’s 2013 book, When Technocultures Collide: Innovation from Below and the Struggle for Autonomy, uses surprising and entertaining examples of the ways technically-inspired subcultures undermine and challenge corporations and governments.

His research demonstrates how technoculture stimulates forgotten technologies and ideas, repurposing and re-imagining them in ways that both subvert and improve technology.

The vignettes he shares exemplify an underlying theme: by subverting technology, outsiders such as phone phreaks not only subvert corporations or governments, but also, ironically, often help them improve technology.

Hacking phone lines can be a resume-builder

Phone phreaks, for example, not only hack in and access free long distance, they also expose the extent to which phone calls can be traced without a warrant.

One phreak Genosko discusses in detail is a young man with the pseudonym “Captain Crunch” (He figured out that the free whistle in the box of Captain Crunch cereal was the exact tone needed to hack into long distance lines). Once Captain Crunch finished his jail time for hacking, he worked for several phone companies, helping them upgrade their security and services.

Even Steve Jobs, Genosko tells us, was once a phone phreak. And in an ironic twist, he says, Apple has hired jailbreakers—hackers who fix their iPhones so they’re able to accept non-approved apps—to work with the company to improve apps and security.

Whether it’s urban explorers, hackers, phreaks or zine publishers, Genosko demonstrates the important, if counter-intuitive, ways in which those on the margins have a significant – often unrecognized – effect on both our technology and our culture.

]]>http://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/05/embracing-counter-culture-warriors/feed/0Sowing seeds of learninghttp://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/04/planting-the-seeds-of-learning/
http://yourontarioresearch.ca/2015/04/planting-the-seeds-of-learning/#commentsMon, 27 Apr 2015 11:00:53 +0000http://yourontarioresearch.ca/?p=9440In the mid-1990s, Maurice DiGiuseppe found himself wandering around a school garden in Hamilton, marvelling at how teachers had incorporated it into a novel lesson plan. The student-run garden at Saint Mary Catholic Secondary School was entirely taken up with plants mentioned in the Bible. Each plant was labelled with its history and use. Strategically-placed […]

]]>In the mid-1990s, Maurice DiGiuseppe found himself wandering around a school garden in Hamilton, marvelling at how teachers had incorporated it into a novel lesson plan.

The student-run garden at Saint Mary Catholic Secondary School was entirely taken up with plants mentioned in the Bible. Each plant was labelled with its history and use. Strategically-placed benches encouraged students to sit and read.

This was thinking outside the plant box, he said to himself, and decided to make a research project out of leveraging school gardens to teach parts of the curriculum — including math and social science — not normally connected with gardens.

This school garden is one of UOIT Professor Maurice DiGiuseppe’s four case studies.(Maurice DiGiuseppe)

“Environmental deficit disorder is a big theory in education right now: students are not connecting with nature,” says DiGiuseppe, a professor of education at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. “I think there is truth in it. But gardens can help with more than that.”

Since that day in Hamilton, DiGiuseppe has accumulated a wealth of knowledge about what works and what doesn’t when connecting gardens and learning.

His current project ­— case studies of four Ontario schools — is meant to guide teachers to make the most of their school garden.

His research subjects include a high school in Peterborough where the teacher in charge of the student-run garden is using it to teach math, economics and social science, in addition to more obvious classes in science and geography.

Students not only take care of the vegetable garden, they pickle and can produce for sale and use the proceeds to make micro loans of $200 to $300 in the developing world.

The students then follow their borrowers’ progress in implementing their business plans and write up posters and multimedia documentaries describing their findings.

Each class is a focus group

DiGiuseppe and one of his graduate students sit in on planning sessions for each school garden, observe students as they plant and weed, and even accompany them on field trips to buy materials and learn how to manage pests.

“We are treating each class as a focus group. At the end of this, we’ll have a multi-media case study to present,” says DiGiuseppe.

But it’s not all sunshine and roses. He will also chronicle the challenges involved in making school gardens work.

For example, getting school boards to provide a suitable parcel of land usually involves a lot of red tape, he says. And plans to have students build their own raised planting boxes can run into road blocks connected to building and safety standards.

With about a year’s worth of data under his belt, DiGiuseppe is ready to begin disseminating his findings this summer at international educational conferences. He also has plans to publish his research in educational journals.

“This is fabulous stuff,” says DiGiuseppe, and the word “really needs to be spread.”